Imagine 30 college-age kids, two rock bands, one journalist and two giant kegs of beer, all mingling on one charter bus that’s rolling down to Roseville, Calif.
“Is this legal?” I ask my friend Mary Henry, gesturing to the on-bus beer as our Greyhound charter pulls out of Reno. Plastic cups of bright pink foam are already being tapped from the Great Basin Brewing Co. kegs of raspberry-flavored beer within minutes of our departure. They look like smoothies. But smoothies don’t make college kids this blissful.
“Apparently,” Mary answers.
I look up at the beer huddle in front of me. People are handing over not just plastic cups to be filled, but also whatever they happen to have on hand: tumblers, water bottles, giant Taco Bell soda cups. One girl even has one of those kids’ cups with a built-in straw. As of now, the kegs are just spitting out foam, but the rollicking bus population is happily drinking it anyway. (“Foam is food,” a college boy once told me in total seriousness.)
I figure Greyhound must have it together as far as the open-container laws go, so I stop worrying.
“OK, kids, here’s the deal,” says a pourer of foam. “We’ve got a four-hour bus ride ahead of us, so pace yourselves on the beer.”
Actually, it’s hard to say just how long the bus ride will last. It’s about two hours each way, but the weather looks like something out of Fargo. Outside, the whiteness is beautiful, hypnotic. Inside, it’s all shouting, laughing and drinking.
Passengers are doing their best to steady themselves—and their beer—against the rocking of the bus as they move back and forth down the aisle.
“This is great,” says Andrew, a friend of the band. “People can’t stand up straight now.”
“I know there’s a reason I didn’t wear my white leisure suit,” says Mary’s friend, Justin. “But we’re on a bus, we’re drinking beer going 55 miles per hour. … What more can you look for in life?”
About a month before local rock band Kriselis’ bus trip extravaganza, Mary, a former RN&R intern and a friend of the band, asked me to come along. It would be Kriselis’ first performance outside of Reno—a gig at a bar in Roseville with a couple of Sacramento bands. Kriselis decided to take their audience with them for the show.
Photo by Carli Cutchin
“This is our first out-of-town show, and we’re promoting,” says band manager Mike Milton. “Nobody
knows us [in Roseville]. If we can bring our crowd with us, that makes a good statement.”
“It’ll be like Almost Famous,” Mary said in way of luring me on the trip. I imagined myself as the 15-year-old novice reporter dude (i.e. groupie with a notebook) in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film, riding the bus with “a mid-level rock band struggling with their limitations in the harsh face of stardom.”
“Sure,” I said.
I’d hadn’t seen Kriselis perform when I got on the bus with the 30 or so passengers, which included the members of local band Dump Your Boyfriends and Kriselis’ band manager, Milton. I ask Milton and the members of the band what kind of music Kriselis plays.
“They’re kind of a mix,” Milton says. “They’re heavier alt-rock. They’re a mix of a little bit of rap and blues with a little hardcore. It’s a mix that makes them a little lighter and more fun.”
I pose the question to Dan Horton, Kriselis’ drummer.
“A lot of people say Deftones. I don’t quite agree. We have the Incubus singer thing, the kind of emo style. People say our music’s pretty hard. I don’t think we sound like everybody else.”
“Alternative metal,” says guitarist Mike Scholes. “That’s the best I can come up with.”
About a year ago, Scholes, Horton, bassist Derek Koelzer and vocalist Yume Usagi (his real name is Cory, but he prefers the Japanese moniker, which means “dream rabbit”) came together to start Kriselis. The band name is actually the phonetic spelling of chrysalis, the word for a butterfly at pupa stage.
“It’s because we can’t read,” Koelzer jokes.
At first glance, it seems improbable that these guys come from the same musical—or even social—planet. Koelzer, with his sleek dark hair and clean-shaven face, dresses in a way that carries hints of his day job as an architect. Scholes, who used to play in a death metal band, has the long blond hair and casual clothes reminiscent of the metal scene. With his wiry build, piercings and baggy pants, Horton looks like he falls somewhere between hip-hop and punk. And Usagi—whom the rest of the band calls the “flamboyant one”—shows up to gigs with the sort of outrageous retro getups that would make even Beck jealous. Their musical tastes are similarly varied, ranging from Santana to Metallica to “girls and guitars.”
Photo By Carli Cutchin
“Honestly, I don’t know how they could be in a band and get along,” Horton’s girlfriend, Amber, tells me on the bus. “It brings different people together who won’t normally hang out. It makes for some interesting encounters, I guess you could say.”
It’s 5:15 p.m. We’ve been on the road for an hour, and the bus is finally inching its way over Donner Summit. The weather is as bad as I’ve ever seen it over the pass. Most cars are pulled off to the side of the road. The ones still on the road are going about 2 miles per hour, and many of them are sliding around like a colt on ice skates.
“Get out of the way, we’re Kriselis,” somebody yells jokingly at the cars.
Our bus driver, Chris, a beautiful woman with an expression of utter tranquility, drives on slowly but calmly, apparently not intimidated by the dreadful road conditions outside or the shouting, laughing and drinking inside.
“Dude, our bus driver rocks,” everyone keeps saying.
By 7 p.m., we’re still crawling over the Sierra. We find out that I-80 east is closed. Probably due to an accident, driver Chris says.
“Well, I brought an extra hundred bucks, just in case we have to spend the night,” Mary says.
I picture us forming a gigantic slumbering heap on the bus floor for eight hours, amid the stench of beer and cigarettes, waiting for the roads to open. I pray for the clouds to break miraculously and the roads to clear.
“It’s like the Donner Party, but with beer,” somebody says.
Sometime after 9 p.m., we finally make it to the bar. We drink more beer, eat pizza and cheer loudly at Kriselis’ passionate performance. We make up at least two-thirds of the bar’s population. The band buys Chris an entire pot of coffee from a nearby convenience store.
We climb back on the bus around 1 a.m., exhausted and sloshed, only to find that one of the passengers has puked inside. All the beer and bus motion must have been too much.
Luckily, the near-blizzard conditions have mellowed and I-80 is open. We won’t have to spend the night amid foul smells after all.
And the band’s reaction?
“I was kind of afraid to get on the bus with a rowdy crowd,” says Horton. “I was kind of afraid I’d get barfed on. But I felt like a rock star. Getting out of the bus, I said, yeah, that’s our bus.”